In the highly inter-connected electronic trading landscape that underpins today’s financial markets, participants increasingly need to source market data from multiple trading venues reliably, consistently and at high speed. And, in the drive to satisfy their own and their clients’ requirements, firms face a number of choices regarding around technology platforms and architectures. This white paper discusses the benefits of taking a hybrid approach incorporating both hardware acceleration and high performance software.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the UK’s national measurement institute, and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) have carried out a proof-of-concept to assess NPLTime®, NPL’s trusted time service for its suitability in disseminating UTC traceable time, as well as providing compliance for the impending MiFID II regulation. This white paper demonstrates how the solution is perfectly placed to deliver a robust and independent timing standard to the financial sector.

In the competitive world of automated trading, deterministic and ultra-low latency performance is critical to business success. In this technical white paper, we share the facts that led our company to shift from developing on specialized hardware to leveraging mainstream technologies. A review of the Xeon® processor, low-latency network adapters, Linux® operating system, and software programming techniques is provided to help design an ultra-low latency solution on mainstream technology.